THE BALLAD OF BLACK BART
namedBest FictionTrue West Magazine's Best of the West
2018

[ new books ]

March
2018

BLACK AND WHITE BALL

[ From
Forge Books ]

Estleman's
most popular characters, PI Amos Walker and hitman Peter Macklin,
are together in one story for the first time in Black and
White Ball!

Detroit
hitman Peter Macklin forces private eye Amos Walker to furnish
protection for Laurie, Macklin's estranged wife, while Macklin
tracks down the party who has threatened to kill her. The man
Walkers client suspects cannot be ignored; as his own grown
son, Roger Macklin has inherited all the instincts,
and acquired all the training necessary to carry out his threat.

Told partly
by Walker in first-person and partly by Macklin in third, Black
and White Ball places the detective squarely between two
remorseless killers, with death waiting whether he succeeds or
fails.

Coming
in November 2018

WILD JUSTICE

[ From
Forge Books ]

In the
spring of 1896, after thirty years spent dispensing justice in
the territory of Montana, Judge Harlan Blackthorne expires, leaving
Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, his most steadfast officer,
to escort his remains across the continent by rail.

The long
journeyinterrupted from time to time by station stops for
the public to pay its respects and for various marching bands
to serenade the departed with his favorite ballad, After
the Ballgives Murdock plenty of opportunity to reflect
upon the years of triumphs and tragedies hes seen first
hand,
always in the interest of bringing justice to a wilderness he,
his fellow deputies,
and the Judge played so important a role in its settlement.

As the
funeral train chugs through prairie, over mountains, and across
rivers once ruled by buffalo herds, Indian nations, trappers,
cowboys, U.S. Cavalry, entrepreneurs, and outlaws representing
every level of heroism, sacrifice, ambition, and vice, Wild Justice
provides a capsule history of the American frontier from its
untamed beginnings to a civilization balanced on the edge of
a new and unpredictable century.

Estleman's
bibliomystery,
"The Book Club,"
is available at The Mysterious Bookshop and is a Mysterious Bookshop
Original Short Story.

"The Book Club" is about the murder of a
wealthy book collector and the elderly
bookshop owner who solves the crime.

DESPERATE DETROIT
And Stories of Other Dire Places
[ From Tyrus Books ]

This collection
represents forty years of suspense writing in the short form.
Previously published in a host of magazines and anthologies,
with a new Preface and introductions
to the stories written especially for this collection, these
eighteen tales feature gangsters, private eyes,
psychotic killers, hitmen, feuding families, prostitutes, prizefighters,
bodyguards, corrupt cops,
the walking dead, and ordinary people driven by desperation to
commit acts of violence.